Friday, January 10, 2014

Feeding fodder beet

This year I grew fodder beets for the first time and I will definitely grow them again. Above shows the fabulous chopping board I got from a second hand shop along with 2 of the hand held chopping blades. It makes light work of chopping up the roots. These fodder beets are pretty small as the first crop failed due to someone planting the seeds half way to Australia!

Below are some of the roots chopped up to sheep size (I'm not sure how big they have to be but I don't want them to choke!) The chopping board is fantastic as you can just scrape them off the shoot at the end into a bucket (bottom left in the above photo)

Today we had snow at last, back to winter now and the sheep are tucking in to the roots. I also mix in a handful or two of dried bread. I will slowly increase the bread quantities over time.

Here is the poor old ram......tied up in the barn......he is not allowed to have "sweeties," well not too many of them anyway. I always give him 2 small cubes of bread when I tie him up as he is really tame and I do not want to stop coming to me when I am horrible and stop him getting the food!

3 comments:

Ello! I'm a new reader of your blog, found you at started reading "& The Pioneer Life", wich I'm also new at. :)I have been wondering about foods for the animals - since I strated reading all of this last night - do you ever buy animalfood? Or do you give them what you have? Was thinking of all animals, but mostly the dogs. :) I'm very interested in this lifestyle. Maybe in the future it's my turn to leave "the comfort zone"!

Hi there Sandra, Thanks for reading my blog! My dog is a lucky one.... We do not buy dog food for her and I mix up our own food. We are lucky enough to have the local areas hunting lodge in the village so I went and collected all the lungs, odd bits of meat and bones. I have bagged up the meat and lungs into the dogs dinner portions and froze them. I then collect bran and reject wheat flour from the local organic mill add some dried seaweed powder to it and mix a bit of meat with some of the bran and flour mix (Plus water). She gets food leftovers, bits of grated carrot and lots of old bread from the bakery. She particularly like steeling the bread from the chicken house!!! A large part of her diet comes from bones as well. I also asked my friend in the village to have all of the bones and bits, including all of the pigs feet, from when he butchered his pigs! She enjoys it all!!! At the moment the sheep have chopped fodder beet and sugar beet mixed in with dried bread from the bakery. They are about to start to have a little more as they are towards the end of their pregnancy and I will be feeding them a mixture of oats and barley which at the moment I have to buy. They also have a selection of minerals which they can lick: salt, sulphur powder, seaweed with a bit of garlic powder mixed in and also some calcium. My chickens have oats and barley, but a big part of their diet is the bran and flour mixed with old egg shells and seaweed. They also get the bones that the dog can not eat e.g. cooked bones. I also grow pumpkins and marrows for the chickens and I hope to grow a lot more cabbage which will last over the winter. I drill a hole in the cabbages and hang them up. The chickens love to peck at it like this. I have also planted some sugar beets in a bucket of soil in our bathroom so that the chickens can have a little bit of green stuff to eat. Our food bill is low, but I hope in the future we can produce all of our feed!!! I can highly recommend leaving the comfort zone. Never be afraid of failure or of the unknown..... even if it all goes wrong you'll have a hell of a story to tell and learn a lot on the way! It also does not ALL go wrong anyway!!!!! Good luck....... :-0

About Us!

We are mostly self sufficient growing our own meat and vegetables, which taste delicious! We are interested in producing our own electricity and constructing interesting and unusualprojects. You can read older posts here. Welcome to our world :-)